blog McAfee customers whose systems went down yesterday should demand they get given money or an extended licence for the time they had to spend fixing the problem.

Yesterday, supermarket Coles said it had been affected by a bug contained in an update of McAfee's antivirus software. Due to this, 18 of its supermarkets had to close for a period of time in Western Australia and South Australia. That's thousands of dollars lost, and all because of a virus definition that wasn't tested properly.

"We believe that this incident has impacted less than one half of 1 per cent of our enterprise accounts globally and a fraction of that within the consumer base home users of products such as McAfee VirusScan Plus, McAfee Internet Security Suite and McAfee Total Protection. That said, if you're one of those impacted, this is a significant event for you and we understand that," it had said yesterday.

The company has since retracted that statement, changing the estimate to a "small percentage" of its enterprise accounts.

This would have really annoyed me if I was an IT manager for one of what was then considered the "less than one half of 1 per cent". If I was running around trying to get machines up while users sat around and tapped their feet in anger or thousands of dollars in revenue wasn't being made, I would have thought, "You bet this is a significant event for me".

After a situation like that, I would have been thinking: "I want my money back. No, better, I want my time back." And as everyone knows, time costs money. So Coles, Commonwealth Bank, Virgin Mobile and others: do you have the guts to ask for compensation? This is how the corporate world works, right?